The Faculty Senate endorsed the latest attempt by the
university's library system to take a stand against for-profit
journal publishers that it says engage in exorbitant pricing
practices.

The senate last week approved a motion on a divided voice vote
that encourages libraries to cancel some costly journal
subscriptions and faculty to withhold articles and reviews from
publishers who engage in questionable pricing practices. The motion
singled out publishing giant Elsevier as deserving special
attention.

"We're not doing this to position ourselves to negotiate more
effectively with Elsevier," said University Librarian Michael
Keller. "We're doing this to change the whole scene. We're trying
to change the fundamental nature of scholarly communication in the
journal industry."

Journal costs have skyrocketed in recent years while many
university library budgets have shrunk, putting librarians in the
uncomfortable position of having to reduce or cancel subscriptions
to some journals valued by academics. At the same time, some
for-profit publishers, like Elsevier, started grouping popular
journals together with less-desirable ones in "big deal"
subscription plans at higher prices, knowing most libraries would
go along with the ploy, Keller said.

A spokesman for Elsevier declined to comment, saying the company
had not had a chance to review the resolution.

Many universities, including Harvard, Cornell and the University
of California, have publicly complained about Elsevier's pricing
tactics and have managed to negotiate better rates by threatening
to pull their business. But Stanford libraries, as a whole, have
fewer contracts with Elsevier than most universities because of a
bold step taken in 1995 to move away from for-profit
publishing.

Stanford founded HighWire Press in 1995 as a way to
electronically disseminate scientific journals and to serve as a
repository where scholars and nonprofit publishers could store
their work for easy public access. The award-winning enterprise, a
division of Stanford University Libraries, has since grown to
become a leader in the nonprofit publishing arena; it produces
nearly half of the 200 most frequently cited science journals.

However, Stanford Libraries still subscribes to 400 popular
Elsevier titles at a cost of just under $1 million per year. The
amount doesn't seem particularly high until you consider that the
libraries spend approximately $6 million on 23,000 journals
annually and nearly 20 percent of the budget is spent on Elsevier
titles that account for about 1 percent of the subscriptions.

Lane Medical Library has a similar relationship with Elsevier;
it spends about 20 percent of its budget on about 300 titles
annually, according to library director Debra Ketchell. The library
does not fall under the purview of Stanford Libraries, but Ketchell
said she supports the senate motion and would continue the
library's annual practice of re-evaluating the journal subscription
list based on price increases and budgetary concerns.

She emphasized that Elsevier is not alone in the practice of
high-price bundling but said that Lane Library has done a good job
of negotiating with the Dutch company for journals that are in high
demand.

"As we move into the future and need to reduce those journals
that we already have in bundles, then we're going to face hard
decisions," Ketchell said. "There are different opinions among the
faculty. The resolution is good because it supports us in taking a
cost-effective, realistic view of how we license and what we
license."

Although most university libraries will likely re-evaluate and
scrutinize current and future Elsevier contacts in light of the
senate motion, it remains to be seen what kind of impact the
nonbinding resolution will have on faculty. The resolution asked
faculty, especially senior faculty, to withhold articles and
reviews from journals and publishers "that engage in exploitative
or exorbitant pricing" in favor of other outlets, preferably
nonprofit ones.

Joanne Martin, business, voted against the motion at the senate
meeting because of concerns about losing access to some Elsevier
journals. "We absolutely need the top-tier journals, which are very
expensive, in order to keep up with our field," Martin said. "And
if the library doesn't have them, the junior faculty and doctoral
students in particular are very concerned that they will have no
other alternative than to pay for an individual subscription, which
they just can't afford to do."

Keller assured Martin that schools and departments, as a matter
of routine, ask faculty to weigh in on which subscriptions are
canceled and which are kept. He also reminded Martin that the
library offers a document delivery service that can retrieve items
from journals the university doesn't subscribe to, typically within
a few days.

"The university's faculty and the research personnel and the
graduate and undergraduate students are going to have to understand
and be somewhat tolerant of some access problems," Keller said.
"There might be some delayed access to things they really need to
have."

Robert Simoni, biological sciences, a HighWire adviser who was
instrumental in its creation, has poured considerable energy into
encouraging his colleagues to avoid Elsevier publications in the
hope of shifting the industry away from for-profits. He said many
academics in life sciences, for example, would resist boycotts of
an Elsevier journal as prestigious as Cell but that over
time it would be more beneficial to do so.

"I think it's going to take a long time for its prestige and
cachet to wear out," Simoni said. "There are still so many people
who think publishing in Cell is going to make their career
that they'll still get submissions. But if institutions like
Stanford and others stop subscribing to journals like Cell,
authors will eventually realize that their work is not being seen.
This is an evolutionary change and it will take time."

Keller said he hopes that other universities will follow
Stanford's lead in rejecting expensive bundling practices from
publishers, even if it means rejecting the journals themselves.

"This has given us a message to send to a whole bunch of other
institutions around the country," Keller said. "It's really
important to see that we didn't buy into the 'must-read' argument
from Elsevier and yet we continue to be a great research
institution with a relatively lean list of periodicals. It's
amazing, and it's a great tribute to this place."